JRPGfan said:
Honestly thats not a worst case, thats more like a best case. Eurogamer says the dev kits are 400 Gflops. If nintendo somehow doubled the power for the final product vs the dev kit, thats a "best case" scenario. I still think OP is wrong. And even if he was right about it being 700 gflops, that is still only HALF of a xbox one slim (not 70%). Then factor in less memory, slower memory bandwidth, ect and its probably less than that. |
Hence the quotation marks. Eurogamer was speculating about the X1, they were calculating based off the clock speeds and an X1, which is highly unlikely because of how well suited Pascal is for a hybrid form factor like the Switch and the Foxconn leak implying such. Not to mention it's cheaper and should become cheaper as time goes on allowing for a bit deeper price cuts.
"There's an additional wrinkle to the story too, albeit one we should treat with caution as it is single-source in nature with a lot of additional speculation on our part. This relates to the idea that the Tegra X1 in the NX development hardware is apparently actively cooled, with audible fan noise. With that in mind, we can't help but wonder whether X1 is the final hardware we'll see in the NX. Could it actually be a placeholder for Tegra X2?"
"While we're confident that our reporting on Switch's clock-speeds is accurate, all of the questions we have concerning the leaked spec remain unanswered.... Performance at lower clocks could be boosted by a larger GPU (ie more CUDA cores), but this seems unlikely - even if Switch is using newer 16nm technology, actual transistor density isn't that different to Tegra X1's 20nm process - it's the FinFET '3D' transistors that make the difference. A larger GPU would result in a more expensive chip too, with only limited performance gains. And if Switch is using a more modern 16nm Tegra chip, we would expect Nintendo to follow Nvidia's lead in how the new process is utilised. However, the Tegra X2 features the same CUDA core count and apparently boosts GPU clocks by 50 per cent, the opposite direction taken by Nintendo."
Having less memory won't be an issue, it seems they're making as simple of an OS as possible to conserve it's RAM consuption, and PS4 and XBONE use half of their RAM on the OS, using around 4 or 5. The Switch having around 3.5 wouldn't sacrifice that much performance at all, playing games with 4GB of RAM instead of 8 on PC for example perhaps cuts down 5-ish frames, that could be easily justified by the lower graphical fidelity and to a lesser extent further optimization and lessen the load on RAM. RAM speeds though are a legit concern, since some of the fastest mobile RAM tops at around 30gbps, that's around half of the XBONE, Nintendo might have figured a work-around for this but I don't find that very likely.
750 GFLOPS is half of XBONE, but with additional optimization software provided by nVidia, you could achieve better performance, I'm not implying groundbreaking optimization magic, but it should still help. There's always the GFLOPs aren't the only measure for graphics, but IIRC there used to be people on Reddit mentioning AMD's tflop efficency, which is worse than Pascal's because the architecture is older, and 800 gflops on Pascal would be a TFLOP in AMD tflops? Not too sure here, would be great if someone with knowledge in this area could fill me in.
Anyways, Switch will be good enough for third party. We have OBE1 saying RE7 with VR (though they're running into performance issues with VR IIRC) and Assassins Creed Egypt on the same day as PS4 and XBONE, and he's been right on no Netflix or etc on launch, online free at launch but charged later, new ATLUS game, new Warriors crossover and Reggie has hinted at Metroid. They managed to optimize GTA V and Rise of The Tomb Raider for X360 and PS3 and it ran well enough on systems that will be inferior to the Switch, if the sales are there developers will put in more effort to do the same for the Switch but with more modern titles. We'll see, I'm heavily speculating here as anyone else, and there's a good chance that I'll be eating my words one day.
